


The Bullet

by triggernometry



Series: Slice of Afterlife [2]
Category: Flight Rising
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-12-04
Updated: 2018-12-04
Packaged: 2019-09-07 10:46:42
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 2
Words: 6,211
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16852597
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/triggernometry/pseuds/triggernometry
Summary: Booth gets shot on the job, and Klagohaj has stronger than expected feelings about that.





	1. Chapter 1

The bullet catches Klagohaj in the chest, just shy of where the ol' ticker should be if it's still in there, knocking him off-kilter. Being shot post-mortem is a lot different than the other thing – it doesn't hurt in the same way, for one thing. It's more like a really bad itch. Like if that itch was made up primarily of enraged wasps.

He lets a long hiss out between his teeth, twists in place enough just to get a look at which _ever_ one of these fools just shot him, and then lets himself drop dramatically onto the dusty ground.

“One down!” That from the stupid cuss who dinged him. Based on the muffled quality of their voice, they must still be hiding in the overturned coach. He never got that one's name during the preliminary fieldwork, but he remembers them as being more bark than bite, skulking around in the shadow of Holtswell and the rest of the gang like a kicked poxhound looking for scraps. He supposes they must've finally figured out how to bite.

Klagohaj lays there, staring up into the Wasteland sky. Sunset has lit the miasma on fire: above is an ethereal green-yellow, but the edges of sky approaching the horizon are an inflamed, noxious amber, a green so sharp it's almost radioactive, and, closest to the obscured eye of the sun, a red that makes the eye water just to see it.  
  
That's the nice thing about being dead: he doesn't need to blink, so he doesn't have to miss this beautiful sunset while pretending that bullet was fatal.

Somewhere, beyond his field of vision, he can hear a growing commotion. That’ll be Booth, coming in from the blind spot. The commotion’s first low, then growing louder and angrier. There's a series of blunt percussive noises, followed by the splintering of wood and a cacophony of fearful shouts made hollow by the closeness of the coach. Two gunshots, quick on each other's heels: Booth's twin revolvers.

Silence.

He sits up, looks over to the wreck of the coach. Booth is crouched on its side, over the inverted crater of splinters that used to be the door before she ripped it open, breathing hard but breathing and unhurt.

The interior of the coach is quiet.

“That all of 'em?” Klagohaj calls.

Booth looks up to meet his eyes, shakes her head.

“Shit,” he breathes. He looks away from Booth on the overturned coach and takes stock of their surroundings. The Mother's Teeth loom around the scene like half-finished effigies that might spring to life at any moment. There's a scattering of bodies around the wreck, wound in and around the Teeth and the rough wagon trail snaking through them: some of the bodies are dragons, some of them Wastebreds, some of them serthis. Holtswell's gang doesn't – well, _didn't_ – discriminate on membership, it seems, and it's not uncommon for beastkin on the outskirts of their communities to join up with dragons on the same, around these parts. Safety in numbers, or something.

There's a heap of Wastebreds a few yards behind the overturned coach. They'd been hauling the flattop wagon at the fore of Holtswell's traveling party, and had hit Booth's mine-trap head-on. The beasts must've taken the worst of the impact, as the flattop itself has only split in two: the front half (along with the driver who sat on it) scattered around the area in splinters, while the back half sits at a jaunty angle against a Tooth a good distance away.

The half-flattop would make a decent hiding spot in a pinch. It's where _he'd_ go.

And sure enough, he can see movement behind it now: a shadow on the ground behind the flattop, then half a dragon leans out from cover, the long snout of their rife moving almost too fast to see to take aim at Booth on the overturned coach and fire.

It's Holtswell.

She wasn't in the coach, after all.

“ _Shit!_ ” Klagohaj says again, louder this time. He scrambles to his feet, kicking up enough dust to make himself cough, and dashes for the overturned coach. Booth is nowhere to be seen. He doesn't even think to just go around the coach, instead hauls himself over it like a starved protomanticore on the hunt for the last fig in the tree.

The impact of the rifle has knocked Booth clear off the coach and onto the dirt behind it. She's already sitting up, propped against the roof of the coach. Her teeth are clenched tight and she's shaking shells out of one revolver and replacing them with fresh bullets with unsteady hands.

Her shoulder is already soaked red.

“Oh, no,” Klagohaj says softly. “No, no, no, _Booth._ ” He kneels beside her, hand hovering over her shoulder but too afraid to touch her outright. All he can do for a second is gape at the blood, then he remembers himself and rips the scarf off from around his neck.

“Y’gotta keep pressure on the bleedin’,” he says, mostly to himself. She doesn’t immediately react so he just puts on his best apologetic face and ties the scarf tight around the hole in her coat while she counts bullets. “Booth--”

“I will live,” she says, pronouncing each word slowly and clearly, like she's reciting a memorised text. She slams the revolver's cylinder shut with a snap, plucks it out of her lap by the muzzle, and hands it butt-first to Klagohaj with her good arm.

“Kill Holtswell.”

She speaks with such intensity that he expects to feel the talisman on his neck pulse in response to a command, but – nothing. She's not using the undead-hunting-dog order voice, which is unexpected.

“Booth, you're hurt, I don't--”

“ _I will live._ Make sure Holtswell doesn't.” She gestures with the revolver in her hand. “Haj.” She looks him square in the eye. “Please.”

He swallows a lump in his throat. “Yes'm.” He takes the gun. He has to, really, even if he's only told Booth about a dozen times now he can't shoot to save his skin. If she hasn't heard him by now there's no point in repeating himself, especially now when every word seems suddenly precious. He stands and heads back around the coach.

Holtswell's rifle goes off before he even sees Holtswell herself, crouched against the belly of the coach. She's a ridgeback too, heftier than he is but shorter, her spines all sawed down to nubs and covered over in red clay from Sourwater Springs. The blast cuts him through the middle, and he feels a chunk of flesh tear loose and fly off into the dust behind him.

He looks down. Sure enough, his ribs are poking out for a little howdy-do. There's not much blood, just a little blackish ooze around the edges.

Klagohaj looks up at Holtswell again. She doesn't look confused or scared, only deeply pissed off that the shot didn't take. She pops the bolt and lifts the muzzle to his head.

“Well,” Klagohaj says flatly, “guess I shoulda seen that comin'.”

He grabs the barrel of the rifle and feels the heat of it sink deep into his palm. He gives the rifle a solid yank, drawing the barrel down and in, dragging Holtswell into striking distance. Klagohaj leans in and smashes his head against hers as hard as he can.

Holtswell swears loudly, staggering back but not relinquishing her grip on the rifle. She manages to wrest the gun back from his grip and fire off another shot, this time blowing a hole through his left wing.  
  
“Yolk _sucker_ ,” Klagohaj hisses through his teeth. It's like a papercut: not a real injury, but disproportionately uncomfortable and infuriating nonetheless.

Holtswell pops the bolt again. He lunges for her, dodging around the muzzle and smashing the revolver hard across Holtswell's forehead, hard enough to split the skin against the bone. She tries to bring the butt of the rifle down on his head but the angle's all wrong and she fumbles the gun instead, dropping it.

There's no room for her to grab for it again so she claws at him, razor-honed thumbs digging into his throat, just above the talisman, making him cough. He leans into the claws hooked into his throat, ignoring the way the pressure makes him want to gag, and uses the leverage to momentarily pin her arms between the two of them. His head darts forward again, this time not to headbutt her but to bite. Hard.

He feels bone and the nubs of spines along her brow grind against his teeth and bites down with all his strength. One of his teeth gives up the ghost and slides free from the socket. It'll grow back. Probably.

Holtswell's disgruntled snarl turns into a shriek of real pain as his jaws find something more giving than flesh in her face. Klagohaj's never been a good fighter, not even when he was alive and _had_ to fight for his life on occasion, but he got by well enough on one simple rule: always go for the eyes.

Holtswell kicks and claws at him with all of her considerable strength. She manages to rip a hand free of his throat and slam a fist into the side of his head, which is enough to make him see stars and force a retreat.

“God damned _abomination!_ ” Holtswell shrieks at him. She staggers back from him, out of reach. Half her face is a shining curtain of red, with a darker spot where her eye ought to be but isn't anymore. “I knew you were no good the _minute_ I laid eyes on you.”

Klagohaj spits blood and bits of flesh onto the dust in front of her. “Yeah,” he says in a rough gargle. He raises Booth's revolver, aiming for Holtswell's face. “So does everybody. You ain't special.” He pulls the trigger.

Nothing.

Somewhere, in his mind, he can just about hear Booth's voice: _Cock the god damn gun before you fire it you god damn_ _ **idiot.**_

Holtswell gives a wordless roar and charges him. He yanks the hammer back on the revolver hard enough to just about snap his own thumb off and fires again, this time for real. Holtswell staggers, choking: he missed her head but got her throat just fine. She clutches reflexively at her neck, blood bubbling in lieu of words, and then staggers, pitching forward onto one knee.

He fires again. This time he doesn’t miss her head.

It's done. He drops the revolver, momentarily overcome by a full-body shiver -- then he remembers. His head snaps up to look at the coach.

“Booth.”  
  
He breaks into a run, darting back around the coach and skidding to a stop beside her. She's still awake, thank the Mother, but the scarf is now soaked through.

“Shit, shit, _shit_ ,” Klagohaj breathes.

“She dead?”  
  
“What?” He blinks. “Oh. Yeah. Yeah, whatever, she's dead.” He shakes his head impatiently. “Ain't what matters now.”

“Just give me a minute, I'll be fine.”

“Bringer's sake, Booth. You ain't _fine._ You been shot!” He points at the shining black hole Holtswell left in him. “I got shot too an' it weren't no damn pop-gun. We gotta get you help.”

“From _who?”_ Booth gestures at the empty Wasteland around them with her good arm.

Klagohaj swallows. She has a point. “Well – me, I guess.”

Klagohaj has never been trusted to be anybody's field-medic. The only time he ever seriously helped anyone in serious trouble was back when Daur's Caravan was still up and running. The gang made a detour before coming to the rendezvous; everybody made out like royalty except for their newest initiate, a mirror only a few years Klagohaj's junior at the time. The kid had been gutshot; she was terrified and sick with pain. Daur told them to leave her, but Klagohaj wasn't part of the gang and stayed with her after they'd left.

He didn't know enough to patch her up right and it was miles in who-knew-which-direction to the nearest doctor. He tried to fish the slug out but to no avail; infection found the wound in short order and then all he could do was give her sips of water from his flask and tell her how sorry he was.

“Well, doctor?” Booth’s voice is pinched with pain but the sarcasm still comes through just fine. Klagohaj frowns.

“We need supplies,” he says. They've got enough at the scouting camp – it's not far, but forcing Booth to move might only make things worse.

“I can walk.”

“But--”

“Just get me up.”

He hesitates, lets out a breath he didn't know he was holding. He moves to her uninjured side and holds a hand out. She pauses a minute to holster her remaining gun with her good hand, then takes the offered boost up.

“Are you sure--”

“Just move.”

He moves. Booth makes to let go of his hand before the first step, then grunts and holds on tight instead. Her breathing's harder with every step and she's moving _too damn slow_ for Klagohaj's liking.

“I gotta carry you,” he says.

“Hell you do.” She jerks her hand away from his and sways slightly in place, glaring at him. “I'm fine.”  
  
He half expects her to command him to leave her be, but she doesn't. He hesitates only a minute before dropping to one knee with his back angled toward her and his wings low.

“Hang your pride an' get on,” he says.

He can hear her muttering darkly under her breath, but she climbs on anyway, good arm slung over his shoulder and around his neck to hang on; injured arm tucked tight to her chest. He hooks his hands over her calves and takes a few testing steps forward to make sure she won't roll right off.

“Told you we shoulda got our own Wastebred,” he says.

“No need,” she says, her voice low but clear in his ear, “I already got a mule.”  
  
He manages a bark of laughter in spite of the knot of fear in his gut.

Klagohaj takes off at a decent clip. Booth's not exactly easy to carry – for one thing, she's clearly never had to piggyback for her life before – but he makes good time. There's still just enough light to see by when they get back to camp.

And to think, he’d kicked up _such_ a fuss about how the scouting camp was too close to the mark before.

He sets her down gentle as he can by the firepit and starts building a fire. While the fire grows itself, Klagohaj gets a tin cup from the travel bag and fills it with water from his flask. He sets the cup on the wire cooking frame over the fire and then resumes rooting around in the bag. He gets out a kerchief, Booth's sewing kit, a roll of scrapcloth bandages, Booth's jar of tachinid paste, and her trusty bottle of rotgut.  
  
He hunkers down next to Booth. She's trying to get out of her coat and failing. He puts the sewing kit and bottle aside and helps her, mumbling an apology every time she hisses with pain.

He looks her wound over. He's no expert, but he figures it could probably be a lot worse. The wound sits high, at an angle over the actual bone, just shy of the joint so near as he can tell. There's a second hole in the knot of muscle just over the wing joint where the bullet took a detour before whizzing off into the Wasteland.

“Looks like it went through,” he says. “The bullet. That's good, right?”

Booth grunts. He decides to interpret that as a yes.

“I think I gotta stitch it shut, though.”

“You ever sewn anyone up before?”  
  
“Uh.” Klagohaj thinks a minute. “No.”  
  
“Cairnstones keep us,” she says, exhaling heavily. “You ever stitch a tear in your clothes before?”  
  
That's much easier to answer. “Yeah, stitch my coat up every now an' again.”

“It's like that, just with meat instead.”  
  
Klagohaj wrinkles his nose and squints. “You really gotta way with words.”  
  
“Just do it.”

He gets the cup of water off the fire and puts it beside the sewing kit and bottle. He dabs the kerchief in the hot water, mumbles “Sorry” one more time, and begins cleaning Booth's wounds. She bares her teeth and jerks in place slightly at first, but then falls quiet and still.

He does a double-take to make sure she’s still awake. Her eyes are open, her gaze fixed on some nothing point in the middle distance. Focused.

The kerchief is red by the time he's done and honestly, he can't tell if Booth's wounds are really any cleaner. He pours some of Booth's rotgut over the bullet holes and she snarls, snatches the bottle out of his hand, and takes a long pull.

Somehow, he's always impressed when she doesn't cough after drinking that stuff. He's had entire sneezing fits over just sniffing the cap when he's not prepared for it.

“I'm ready,” she says.

He gets to work. Despite the unpleasantness of the description, stitching skin _is_ pretty much just like stitching a coat, just with meat instead. He stops wincing after every pull of the needle after a while and just focuses on getting the wounds closed.

When all's said and done, he thinks his handiwork looks pretty functional. Not pretty, but functional.

He dabs tachinid paste on the stitches gentle as he can. Once he's satisfied, he puts the paste aside and makes a new bandage – a better one now he's got supplies and less raw panic flooding his body.

He looks at his handiwork and decides he doesn't need Booth messing it up doing something stubborn and foolhardy, so he gets to work putting together a makeshift sling for the arm.

“You could've just left me there,” she says. “I'd have bled out eventually. Probably.”

“Yeah, _probably,_ ” he says. “More like you'd sleep it off an' then come kick my ass for leavin' you.”

She laughs, then coughs, then winces as the cough pulls at the wound. She's quiet a minute, then: “You'd be free.”

He feels a lump form in his throat. He breathes in slowly through his nose and focuses on making the sling.

“If I died,” she says, “you'd be free.”

“You sure do _talk_ a lot for a stoic vigilante killer,” he snaps. His hands are shaking, his fingers slipping on the buckle he's trying to make cooperate.

Booth falls silent. He doesn't look at her, but he can still feel her eyes on him.

After a moment with nothing but the jangling of the belt in his useless hands, he says, quietly, in words that almost hurt to leave him: “Maybe I don't _want_ you to die, y'ever think about that?”  
  
“Why?”  
  
“Whatcha mean _why!_ ” Klagohaj throws the makeshift sling down in his lap and stares at her, feeling more worked up than he did while trying to get Holtswell to just shut up and die already. “Cause I ain't got no _damn_ magic spells what can bring you back the way you brung me back! Cause if you die you _die_ an' you're all I _got_ , that's _why!_ ”

He's shouting by the end of it and breathing like a Wastebred fresh off the quarter mile. The holes in his throat itch powerfully from the strain of his voice. Booth is staring at him, looking – well, inscrutable, the way she usually does.

He draws a hand down his face and over his snout. His fingers catch in scratches left behind from headbutting Holtswell's stupid spiny face. The lower half of his face is still slightly tacky with what must be blood he forgot to wipe off after the scuffle.

“I'm sorry,” he says. “Lost my temper. Shouldn'ta done that. Lemme just put this sling on for you an' we can call it a night, huh?”

Booth doesn't speak while he fits the sling to her arm, doesn't even grumble when it takes him entirely too long to figure out the logistics of getting her arm in there and tight without cutting off all the blood supply at the same time.

Klagohaj eyeballs the sling and the arm inside of it. “How's it feel?”

She moves a little in place, bending side-to-side a bit to test her movement against it. “It'll do fine,” she says.

Klagohaj gets to his feet. He gathers up the supplies he used, cleans some of them in boiling water and buries the rest in the dirt a few steps away from the lean-to. When he comes back, Booth is still sitting by the fire, poking at it with a long stick in her good hand.

He rubs at the back of his neck, feeling the foolishness of his outburst weighing heavily on him. He hopes she won't hold it against him – but this _is_ Booth, after all. She's not exactly been known to just let things go.

He clears his throat. “You, uh, hungry or somethin'? I could fry up some'a that smoked yawner we got left.” He clears his throat again, and it does not help one bit. “If, uh, you wanted.”

“All right,” Booth says. Her voice is suspiciously calm. He feels a pang of concern in his breast but powers on anyway, getting the skillet and the rest of the smoked yawner out of his traveling bag and setting it up on the wire cooking frame with a pad of podid grease. He thinks better of it and gets out his packet of dried locusts and a bottle of what he calls his “special spice” (powdered-up blacktongue pepper for spice, murkbottom kelp for salt, bonebark mold for colour) and sprinkles a healthy helping of both into the bubbling grease.

They eat from the skillet in silence. Klagohaj leaves the bulk of the food to Booth – he could probably go without food entirely, if he wanted to, and anyway, _he's_ not recovering from a potentially fatal injury.

“We oughta stay here a coupla more days,” he says once the skillet is empty.

Booth shakes her head. “We didn't bring enough supplies for that long.”

Klagohaj pours leftover podid grease back into the can and wipes the skillet down with a wad of old newspaper. “Well, that's what optimism gets you, but we can't move 'til you've healed up some.”

“Haj--”

“Like this,” he continues. “You sleep. I keep watch 'til morning. Then I skedaddle on back to Holtswell's heap in the mornin' an' grab whatever supplies they had on 'em. Maybe carve up one'a their Wastebreds if the bonepickers ain't picked 'em too bad. Sourwater's just a mornin's walk that-a-way” – he points with the metal spatula he's wiping down – “so water ain’t gonna be a problem.”

Booth snorts. “Look at you. You kill one bandit boss and now you're Mr Take-Names.”

There's enough of a compliment in that to make heat crawl up the side of Klagohaj's neck. He didn't even know he still _could_ blush. He coughs and busies himself with putting the cookware away.

“Well,” he says. “Broken clock's right twice a day, an' all.”


	2. Chapter 2

Healing up from a serious injury means having to take it easy, which means Booth has more to adjust to than simply relying more on one arm than the other while her shoulder puts itself back together: she has to get used to having help.

The feeling of helplessness being short an arm gives her is bad enough. It's made worse by Haj's inability to be inconvenienced by helping her with tasks more mundane than wiping another bandit gang off the map. He doesn't complain about doing all the scavenging himself the first week, about hauling half a Wastebred back for their dinner by himself, about making a second trip to Holtswell's wrecked convoy to strip whatever goods he can salvage and carry. Not even a peep about walking alone to Sourwater to fill up a water drum he found at the wreck to keep them watered for the next handful of days.

He takes to the extra workload gladly, as far as she can tell, and that frustrates her more than she can explain even to herself.

Worse still, of course, are the echoes of old gunshots, the bullet wounds they left behind long healed but nonetheless present in her mind -- worse wounds, ones that brought her much closer to death. She sleeps even less than usual, staying awake until her eyes go bleary in the hope of avoiding the worst of her dreams.

Each night, after the day's business of surviving is done, Haj examines Booth's injury, cleans it and treats it with tachinid paste, and dresses it again with fresh bandages.

“Looks good,” he says each time. “I think. Nothin' smells off.”  
  
Prior to this incident, Booth would not have put much stock into Haj's ability to judge the severity of a papercut much less anything more serious – but he's right. She angles her head each time he tends the wound and she has to agree: it does look good. Well, the scar will be exceptionally ugly thanks to Haj's clumsy needlework, but at least she'll _have_ a scar.

She listens to him hum while he stews old bandage cloth in boiling water and feels agitation gnaw at her bones like rats returning to a dead thing long after the meat's dried to unpalatable jerky.

They spend more than a few days at the scouting camp. Haj picks the bandit wreck they left behind near clean by the time Booth announces her decision to head back out into the Crinoline and to the scrap-tent.

He gives her a concerned, measuring look. She's never quite sure how he can be so expressive and still impossible to understand.

“You sure you up for it?” he asks.

She tries not to let the irritation seep into her voice. “ _Yes._ ” She fails.

There's not much more discussion on the matter than that. Haj packs up the camp and shoulders both of their traveling packs, despite her insistence that she can carry at least her share of the goods.

“I got it,” he says. He gives her an earnest smile, revealing the dark gap where he lost a tooth during the fight with Holtswell. The tooth is the only other reminder of the fight that isn't the wound in Booth's shoulder: the long, ugly slashes Holtswell left in Haj's throat are gone, and the hole in his middle filled in and sealed over in little to no time at all.  
  
They head back into the Crinoline without incident. Haj keeps the pace slow, for which she is quietly, privately grateful; even the most measured step stirs up a dull pulse of discomfort in her shoulder. She's not exactly unused to pain, but she feels the constant nearness of it wear her patience thinner than usual.

She doesn't let the relief she feels show on her face when they make it back to the stone and driftwood circle of their more permanent camp in the Crinoline. Haj drops their gear by the long-cold firepit and gets to work resurrecting the camp: drawing up the scrap-tent from where it's lain flat and invisible against the red soil; tapping the toe of his boot against the earth until it comes back to him in the hollow thump of the wooden lids of their buried caches scattered around the camp.

By sundown, it hardly looks like the ever left the scrap-tent at all.

Booth does what she can to pitch in, which feels frustratingly little. Certainly none of the heavy lifting. She sorts gear and supplies out of the traveling bags and counts what's left after their surprise extended stay in the Mother's Teeth.  
  
It's not much, but they left enough supplies behind with the scrap-tent to pick up the slack.

Haj sets up the spit-roaster and threads a repurposed wagon box rod through the salted side of a podid they'd left behind, buried deep enough to stay cool and avoid detection from scavengers. Booth stirs a pot of gravy over the fire and focuses on not letting it show how tiring the return trip really was.

She imagines the bullet half-a-hole leaking weakness through her shoulder, down her arm and along her spine, and feels resentment scrabbling through her breast on tiny, useless claws.

As far as she can tell, Haj's not similarly worn out by the trek. He whistles while he prepares the podid; the whistling turns into humming as he busies himself around the camp, and grows into full-blown singing before too long. It's a song she's heard him sing before, though the inanity of the lyrics usually escapes her memory once he stops singing them: something about birds and snakes, in a key that seems specifically designed to highlight Haj's nasally drawl.

“Can't we just have a _minute's_ peace?” She's speaking before she's consciously registered the decision to open her mouth. She feels a stab of regret in the sudden quiet that falls over the camp. “God damn it,” she mutters, mostly to herself. She stabs at the pot of gravy with the spoon; some of it spills over the side and hisses furiously in the fire. “God _damn_ it!” she says again, louder.

“Hey.” Haj hunkers down next to her and puts a hand on her wrist, steadying her. “Hey, easy now.”  
  
“I _got_ it,” she says. She tries to shake his hand off without letting go of the spoon; she's not very successful.

“C'mon, lemme have it,” he says. His voice is soft, gentle, not quite coaxing. It rankles more than the constant rub of the sling against her shoulder.

“I _got it_ ,” she snaps, half snarling the words. “I can _stir_ a god damn _pot._ ”

“Just--”

She lets go of the spoon, but not to turn it over to him. She jerks her hand away from his, shifting in place enough to give him a hard shove with her good arm. Haj tumbles backward, landing on his tail in the dust.

“ _Stop_ ,” she says. The words are thick as tar sliding over her tongue, burning her throat and making her teeth itch. She can't see the talisman under Haj's shirt collar, can't see the carnelian eye in its center snap to life at her voice, but she _can_ see the look on his face: surprised, a little fearful, but mostly –  
  
Mostly he just looks hurt.

She hasn't used the talisman in a while. Months, at least. She doesn't know why. In the beginning, she used it for nearly everything – but their relationship was different, then, more like a hunter to her hound than anything more substantial. Anything more like what it's apparently turned into while she was looking the other way. Whatever resentments Haj had for her seem to have dried up, been replaced with – well, whatever it is that's got him fussing over her like a broody hen.  
  
Haj picks himself up slowly. He goes back to whatever he was doing before – turning the roast, rooting around in their gear to find their bowls and cutlery and whatever else. She watches him for a bit; he doesn't look at her again, not even when dinner is finally ready and he saws hunks of podid into her bowl and ladles a liberal helping of gravy over it – the disguise, as Haj calls it, making what she considers fairly unpalatable meat somewhat tolerable.

  
They eat in silence. Haj stares at the fire and Booth tries not to stare at him. She feels the uncomfortable, unfamiliar weight of an apology in her throat and tries to swallow it down with overlarge chunks of meat.  
  
Booth's attempt to help with cleaning up after supper prove fruitless; Haj's just more efficient at it, apparently. She retreats to the scrap-tent, where she can at least unfurl the bedroll and also not run the risk of meeting Haj's eyes by accident. She doesn't bother bending down to roll out the bed, she just gives it a half-hearted kick with the toe of her boot until it's more or less in position. She throws the pillow and blanket over it in some approximation of where they ought to go. Good enough.

A comically pronounced _ahem-hem_ from the tent-flap startles her. She looks up; Haj's giving her an apologetic half-smile and not quite looking at her face.

“I should, uh” – he gestures to her shoulder – “take a look. 'fore you get tired. I mean.”

She doesn't respond, just follows him back out to the firepit and takes a seat. Haj's already got everything ready to go, so he just unwraps the wound and looks it over as quickly and quietly as he apparently can. She focuses on the fire, ignoring the dull ache of the wound as he cleans it and dabs it over with tachinid paste. Her eye drifts over the jar in his hand; it's almost empty.

“We're gonna need more of that,” she says.

“Huh?” He looks at her, then follows her gaze down to the jar. “Oh. Yeah. I was, uh, was gonna ask you about that. Uh, 'bout how you make it an' such.”  
  
“It's not difficult. Most you need is patience and bait for the flies,” she says.

“An' here I was plannin' on just usin' my good looks an' charm,” he says. She looks up at him. His expression's mostly serious but there's a hint of a self-satisfied grin at the corner of his mouth. She gives a sardonic snort and he looks startled, then relaxes almost immediately once he meets her eyes.

“You'd have more luck with a bowl of vinegar,” she says.

“Yeah,” he says, unspooling a roll of bandages, “that's what the gals keep tellin' me.”  
  
_That_ makes her laugh. A real laugh, this time. He looks up from the roll in his hands and grins, a furtive expression that grows more confident when it turns out the laugh is for real.  

“Guess I oughta keep the witticisms to myself 'til you're all healed up,” Haj says. He replaces the bandage around her shoulder with ease; Shaker knows he's had enough practice at it, by now. “You're gonna bust a stitch at this rate.” He pauses. “Then I'm gonna have to learn how to sew you back up all over again.”

“You did just fine the first time.”

Now it's Haj's turn to laugh. “Great horn spoon, Booth,” he says, shaking his head. “You cut this paste with somethin' special or you just gettin' soft on me?” He gathers up the old wraps and drops them into the pot of water he's got bubbling away on the fire.

“I'm sorry,” she says. The words come out on their own, jumping rabbit-quick from her teeth before she can clamp her jaw shut on them.

“Make no trouble on my account,” Haj says, waving a hand lightly through the air. He affects a haughty look. “Bringer knows I am a prideful weed grown best in complementary soil.”

“I don't mean that,” she says. “I mean about – what I said. What I did.”  
  
Haj's expression sobers rapidly. He gives a half-hearted shrug. “Don't matter,” he says. “Past is past.”

“Why the hell won't you just be _annoyed_ for once?” Booth struggles not to yell, contents herself with just gritting the words out through a jaw gone tight with resentment. Haj gives her a surprised look.

“I'm, uh – I'm not followin', Booth.”

“You just _take_ it,” she says. “You got every right to be angry and you just –“ She gestures at him with her good arm, unable to find the right word.

“Bein' angry ain't gonna solve any problems,” Haj says. He prods the boiling water in the pot with a wooden spoon. “An' I ain't angry with you anyway.” He takes a deep breath and lets it out in a long exhale. “I know _you're_ angry an' you blame yourself for gettin' shot,” he adds, in a softer voice. “You wanna blame somebody, blame me. I tripped Holtswell's bullshit detector an' that's prob'ly what got her to switch transports in the first place. That hadn't happened, she'd've been in the coach like we said an' dead before she'd've known what hit her.”

Booth is quiet for a moment, unwilling to speak for fear of saying something she'll regret: something too vulnerable or something too mean, she's not sure which. Of course she blames herself for getting shot. She hadn't figured on Haj feeling the same, and the implication that he feels regret – guilt, maybe, even – over how the Holtswell job went down brings sudden clarity to his behaviour thus far.

“It wasn't your fault,” she says, finally.

“Well, then it wasn't _your_ fault neither.”  
  
She sucks in air for a rebuttal – then lets it out in a slow, resigned sigh. “Fine. It wasn't anybody's fault.”  
  
“Now can we get back to feudin' over stuff that don't matter, like how to catch flies an' which part of a podid tastes good?” Haj looks up to give her a wide, gap-toothed grin.  
  
“ _No_ part of a podid tastes good,” Booth says reflexively, smiling in spite of herself.

Haj gives a reedy laugh. “See, _now_ it’s on.”


End file.
